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Is France Broke?
Last Friday, EURSOC reported on how French journalists were complaining that they couldn't keep up with the relentless activity of President Nicolas Sarkozy. We're beginning to get an idea of how they feel.
It has been another busy weekend for the President. He gave his first interview to the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times, and the reporters all-but-said that he clearly wished he was somewhere else.
In the interview, he made it clear that he didn't foresee war in Iran. He also laid out the conditions under which France might rejoin NATO's military command: "I would make progress on European defense a condition for moving into the integrated command, and I am asking our American friends to understand that," he said, adding that NATO's governing bodies would have to squeeze up to make space for France. "France can only resume its place if room is made," he said. "It's hard to take a place that isn't reserved for you."
The newspapers say that Sarkozy is putting the ball firmly in the court of the United States. Bill Clinton knocked back Jacques Chirac's tentative proposals to rejoin the high command - will Bush, or his successor, take a different line?
There is more to this issue than the reporters suggest. First, France would be among NATO's second-ranking military powers after the US and alongside Britain and Turkey. It would be the third nuclear-armed nation in the alliance. Of course the NATO command structure would alter, perhaps hugely, to reflect France's status. Whether or not eastern European members would welcome this is a different matter - but a nation that seems to agree with Washington and London's analysis of Russia's worrying direction would be welcomed by those who suffered under Soviet imperialism last century.
Sarkozy says he wants to see an official acknowledgement of European military defence - an expansion of the EU Rapid Response force, Eurocorps or the EU's "Defence Council" - all projects dear to the heart of his predecessor, Mr Chirac. Chirac even had Eurocorps, a little-known pooling of European militaries, leading the Bastille Day parade in 2003.
But this is sensitive, not least because of Turkey. Turkey is a NATO member; Sarkozy opposes Turkey's membership of the EU (though he has said he will not veto it). Turkey would surely make a valuable contribution to any future EU force, as it does to NATO - except Sarkozy doesn't want the Turks on board.
More sensitively still, how would US generals react to sharing intelligence with French forces? There are some cases whereby US intentions and French interests do not overlap. How will this be handled? What about resentment about troops being placed in the line of fire? Some EU nations refuse to send their men to danger zones in Afghanistan, for example, leaving the Brits and the Yanks to tough out NATO's business there.
Overlapping interests ensure sleepness nights for diplomats and political scientists. Who would be a priority for France, NATO or the EU force? And what about interests in Iran, Franco-Africa, Russia?
Sarkozy is right, though, that NATO needs a new role. And it is true that while foreign policy is one of the few areas of politics he has little experience of, it is at least one of the traditional briefs of France's presidents. Sarkozy's presidential mission, as he sees it, isn't to retreat from public life to become the semi-mystical "father of the nation" role usually reserved for French leaders. He wants to overhaul society from the bottom up, the much-heralded 'rupture.'
He doesn't discuss the rupture in his NYT-IHT interview, but elsewhere, others are doing it for him. John Lichfield, in the Independent, speaks with Normandy farmers who worry about Sarkozy's plans to reform the Common Agricultural Policy. Prime Minister François Fillon is drawing Sarkozy's fire, telling unions and farmers on Friday that France is bankrupt and that the country can no longer afford to feather-bed its workers.
Figures on the right and the left lined up to attack Fillon. For the right, former PM Jean-Pierre Raffarin said the phrasing was "clumsy". He said that while no words can be banned from public life, it wasn't exact to describe France as skint: "France has many riches", he said, "but it is too indebted." For its part, the left believes that Fillon is lining up more cuts, and gripes that Sarkozy's promise to talk to unions about reforms is all window-dressing. Fillon's supposed "gaffe" when he claimed that the reform program was complete, he just needed to flick the switch, reveal the true nature of the new administration, they argue. Furthermore, the hard left believes that France has plenty of money, but should squeeze the rich and businesses more to support the state.
Fillon's claim found unlikely support from another Frenchman, governor of the European Central Bank Jean-Claude Trichet. Responding to mounting criticism from Sarkozy about the ECB's refusal to cut interest rates, Trichet "told TV5-Europe1 it was France’s high public expenditure and inability to curb the rise in its production costs that helped to explain its relative lack of competitiveness.
"France has to “adapt faster”, he said, if it was to draw the full benefit from a global economy, pointing out that German public expenditure was 9 percentage points of gross domestic product lower than France’s."
Trichet is unlikely to charge to his country's aid, however, warning that it is a "pretty general rule" that central banks remain free of political interference.
